Frederick Farrar is one of the few 'living memory' characters in the books The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald. Frederick Farrar was a neighbour and a close friend of the author whilst he lived in East Anglia, who forms a character in the book as the author travels once again through Lowestoft to revisit a favourite landscape.
Farrar was an elderly gentleman at the time that the author knew him, who clearly remembered the outbreak of hostilities that marked the beginning of the First World War. The author uses the character of Farrar as a living bridge and a testament to a far off time which almost seems lost to our modern day selves as he contemplates the town of Lowestoft seen through Farrar;s eyes, and the strange, ominous importance of 'The Last Post' being played one day at school.
By setting his friend Frederick within the narrative of this book, the author succeeds in bringing to life some of his message and the material of the work. The idea that history and the past is not really dead in so far as any one can remember it or pass on those stories of about it. The author also uses the recollections of Farrar almost as a modern day herald of a lost time (symbolised by that Bugle playing the war memorial, The Last Post). In a literary way, the character of Farrar and his memories are used as a psycho-pomp between the modern world of appearances and this darkening, almost forgotten history that the author is exploring.
